Category: Legacy: Life Among the Ruins: Play Reports

Playtest Report – Legacy Vix, chapter II

Characters

The Enclave sent Agent Vivek, a Seeker

The Lawgivers’s Trevor is a Rebel Survivor.

The Cultivators proudly sent Aneela, their Leader Hunter.

The Merchants face is Arella, an Elder Agent.

There was still time to do the character Backtory, developing the Councilor’s as this Age’s main antagonist. We narrated the occasion where Aneela and Trevor confronted Lopak in Deepwater’s precarious overboard structures, meeting and saving Akikev in the process. It all ended with the classical ‘dive to certain death among debris’ for our favorite villain!

Overall Plot:

1) The Councillor Lopak mad quest for technology…

2) And the weirdness breeding pit of the Zone are certainly tied.

3) The ecological collapse caught my eye, and it may end up as the chronicle’s guiding force.

4) Haven and its inhabitants are also danggling with bells in front of us. I intend to set the pace here and if they skip a beat, they might lose this specific Front altogether.

The Age will be ripe for turning once Fronts 1 and 2 is somehow resolved. I intend to push for a intimate integration between Families, in order to give them more common grounds. I just have some inkings on how to do this.

Adventure Plot:

Lets check the Roles hooks

Akikev is looking for a sollution to alleviate the Parssons plight. Aneela can declare a blood hunt upon a family enemy. Arella will advise younger leaders in matters they dont fully comprehend. And Trevor will turn against his Family whenthey behave not unlike the savage evil nobodies that dot the Homeland.

So, mixing it all with Backstory and Treaties it came to me a tale of a manhunt for Councillor Lopek and its consequences.

What kind of weird effect did he manage to harness from the Zone and weaponize ?

How much collateral damage is acceptable to catch him?

Will his followers see any kind of mercy?

What kind of justice will he receive when he is captured?

Will his findings be saved and used to contain the Zone spread?

A few other side questions

How are the Owls descending into barbarism?

How brutal will the Black Tower become as hysteria piles up?

How can the Parssons defend themselves?

How can Cerberus survive as the Warren falls apart into barbarism?

Takeaways from the playtest so far:

1) The brand new Role engine is this playtest’s focus. And right away it made the Landmarks Threat session obsolete with its combination of motivations and triggers.

2) We need to Expand the Armor Tag collection to match Arsenal

3) Intel received some flak for not being immediately useful for a character, since it depends on Data.

4) On the Playbooks titles and subtitles need a starker distinction in order to avoid confusion

5) Gear is too dependent on the Family

6) The new art is gorgeous

So far, so good!

Playtest Report – Legacy Vix

Presential table with quite a mixed group: Attila (literature professor, 3 Legacy sessions), Sérgio (lawyer and former cop, 10ish Legacy sessions), Thalles (portuguese teacher and drummer extraordinare, new to the system) and Tato (art director for a marketing company, new to the system).

Step 1: Broad Strokes

I usually skip this whole session and pretty much described the game premise to the new players. My advise for them was to let ideas flow in organic fashion and follow playbooks instructions and all would be ok.

Step 2: Family

The Families are where our scenario would be drawn and our background history told.

Sérgio picked the Lawgivers (first option was the Starfarers, but they were not ready)

Attila picked the Enclave (again!)

Tato picked the Merchants.

Thalles picked the Cultivators.

🙂 I rewrote the Sworn Hunters and presented to them as an option. At first there was almost a fight about who would get it, then nobody got it, then a new fight so no one would get them. People loved the concept, but nobody wanted to have to deal with the Behemoth – my fault, i keep calling them Kaiju 🙂

:-/ The more experienced players discouraged anyone from picking the Tyrants, claiming it to be a “difficult Family to play with” :-/

Family values

The first part of Family creation is picking stats. Depending on the stat array you choose, you’ll make certain statements about the world.

In turn…

Thalles told us that much of the natural world survived the Fall intact.

Tato told us the Fall was a gradual and grinding event.

Attila tolds us the Fall unleashed many new technologies.

Sérgio tolds us that only law and order saved Mankind from extinction.

So, good chances we are on Earth and the technological level from Before can be a mystery, since it was rendered obsolete by the technologies discovered during the long grinding Fall. The landscape is wild and ruins were reclaimed by nature.

Next, each Family has options for Traditions – who’s in your family, how they relate to each other and what their style is.

The Merchants are the middlemen between a redoubt of priviliged people and the teeming masses at the gates. They look and behave like nobles of old.

The Lawgivers are guided by christian-judaic laws (Commandments?) and function like a recruiting secret society of vigilantes.

The Enclave… pheeww… are a monastic order lead by the gestalt mind of their council. They research and hunt down whatever Fall Tech they can get.

The Cultivators renounced the world before the Fall and prepared to survive it and to emerge in the aftermath to nurture mankind. Really “primitive”.

Drawing the map

Next comes Landmarks. Each playbook has options to add to the homeland map so that you build the initial setting together. Here my on the fly teaching style got the best of the group (or it was the booze) and they had difficulties building upon their colleagues ideas in an organic fashion.

Tato with the Merchants added:

Center: The Warren where hundreds of thousands of people’s flight for safety came to an end. A sprawling mess of vehicles and tents that slwoly became a shantytown

North Center: The Haven is nested in a deep valley. It guards the last redoubt of the priviliged, sheltered from the Fall and secluded from the world.

Sérgio with the Lawgivers added:

South: Deepwater, an oil rig right off the coast that houses a lawless settlement

South to East: The Shore, littered by the carcass of hundreds of vessels, also a corresponding stretch of polluted / irradiated land along the shore

Attila with the Enclave added:

North East: Skywatch mountains and settlement, where a scientific outpost was once built around an observatory

East Center: The Zone of twisted laws of physics, an expanding area inimical do all life.

Thalles with the Cultivators added:

South East: The Grey Wood, a vast forest, calcinated and killed by whatever was unleashed from The Plant

Further South East: The Plant is a huge factory / scientific compund, isolated from the world, where the Fall once started.

The Threats were more organic and we came back a lot to it when distributing Treaties. Summarizing, the ecosystem is breaking down: massive drought, infertile livestock, sterile seas. Obviously, panic among survivors has been listed as a definite Threat. But also, there is a certain rogue Councillor Lopac from The Enclave, which became the Age villain after hounding the Merchants… we came back a lot to him during Characters Backstory.

Making history

The Family History section was next, with everyone working out what obligations each Family owed each other.

The Cultivators rely on the Lawgivers to provide protection.

The Enclave thinks the Lawgivers have the greatest minds of the homeland.

The greatest criminal of the Wasteland came from the Enclave, and led a band of raiders, the Smillers, on a raid on the Warren, victimizing the Merchants.

The Lawgivers saved the Merchants from extinction at the hands of the Smillers .

Doctrine and Lifestyle

Each Family had two choices: one move based on their personal philosophy, and one based on their distribution across the homeland:

The Enclave are settled in Skywatch, holding back another Fall.

The Lawgivers roam around as righteous vigilantes.

The Cultivators slowly drift from the natural world in the Clearing farms.

The Merchants are the new nobility of the Warren.

Resources and Moves

Finally, we get to the resources each family can bring to bear.

The Enclave, named The Parssons, have a surplus in Culture and Knowledge, but need Recruits, Leadership and Defences. They have deep knowledge of the monsters unleahsed by the Fallt’, and medical treatments able to heal any artifice (based on the evevntual sacrifice for dissassembling).

The Lawgivers, aka The Black Towers, have a surplus of Weaponry and Transport but need Leadership, Defences and Recruits. They’re committed to persecuting those beyond the reacj of the law and are fanatically against raping or any sort and can brandish their authority to recruit a gang of locals to fight at their side.

The Cultivators, aka Owls, have a surplus of Medicine and Land but need Culture, Trade Goods and Progress . They can sacrifice progress, land or trade to make drugs, crops or livestock, and can genetically engineer themselves over the ages.

The Merchants, aka Cerberus, have a surplus of recruits and culture but need Medicine, Barter Goods and Contacts. They have a stock in trade of Food and Art and they’re skilled at assessing the worth of things they find.

Legacy Play Report – Olympus Run, 3rd Session

Session 3

Lots of changes!

We agreed that we needed to explore better Olympus issues and work to solve them. So, we zoomed in the narrative and drew the megalopolis map, where this session would take place. Factions and Threats were added. Praxis was now represented by The Sentinel, a young and charismatic war leader, and Kommittee had a veteran Hunter, one the most respected voices of the collective.

A nice step was asking where were the Characters at important points of their Families’ history. Another question was if they met the previous Characters and what were their whereabouts.

Both Families started over Reading the Wind and working hard to locate Needed resources. Also, the Kommittee retroactively used This is a Civilized Land in settlements in Olympus ruins. While, Praxis immediately unleashed Voice in the Wilderness to denounce rival settlements.

This was an action heavy session, as it can be expected from the Characters choice. They fought off Mutants (and deeply regretted having said that the were very unpredictable foes in the prompting). Stopped a convoy with stolen drugs, and covered up their action to share the Resource for both Families. Also, hunted down a mercenary on the Pathfinders’ payroll. Hectic, but cohesive action.

By the end of the session, it was becoming clear that Praxis creed was too radical and bound to fail on a larger scale. On the other hand, the Kommittee was quickly becoming the power behind many thrones in the Homeland . No Turn of Ages at this point. Both players earned an advance for their Characters and left their Families better as they got it in the beginning.

Legacy Actual Play Report – The Olympus Run

Second Session

Characters remained the same, and the new Threat was that huge glyphs were being carved out in Homeland by some sort of light from the skies. Players were now more aware of their Family needs. I also adapted a little of my story weaving to this aspect, also providing them Fronts / Threats that could solve their Needs.

The end result was that they started chasing one the Praxis heretics, now called Pathfinders, into the Wasteland. The heretic had uncovered an alien ruin and managed to activate its defenses (energy based drones, like the Agent of the previous session) and orbital weapons (the mysterious glyphs).

The confrontation was a long and heavily roleplayed scene, with a good dramatic punch. In the ruins the Remnant found out about its alien origins. I was very satisfied with the pace of the session so far and that it focused more on the characters and the lore of the land. But, in any case, they did come out of the session with some Resources harvested from the ruins and some more immaterial ones gained from the proper handling of the Herectic (Justice and Motivation, for example).

On the Homeland, the Kommittee approached different Factions outright selling their services as hired guns. This resulted in a massive contract to reclaim the Megalopolis, christened Olympus. The Kommittee player, in a rare canny move towards his fellow player, spent his Treaties with Praxis so they would first, galvanize the Homeland population towards the Reclamation, and second, spearhead the Claim by Force. Praxis obviously failed to deliver and the Reclamation just stirred Olympus mutants in far and wide raids.

Another quick Turn of Ages followed, 12 years. Praxis managed to keep on being hated and harassed by the people they tried to save. But, at least they managed to create a Haven of sorts in Olympus, New Athens. And the Kommittee had clearly some Kharma to account for, for they were contract bound for 12 years to the Factions, since they failed to deliver them Olympus from the mutants. Not all enforcers bowed their heads to the contract and the house split, with one of the halves remaining in Olympus to shape New Athens into a communist model society.

Legacy Actual Play Report – The Olympus Run

The Set Up

Prompting players to each add an element to each question.

“What was the world before like?” – a colony on a terraformed frigid planet that could be Mars.

“What is the homeland like?” – covered in cold-resistant red vegetation, vast expanses.

“What signs of the old civilization remain?” – ruins of a megalopolis overran by mutants, an enigmatic ruin from alien species.

“How did it fall down?” – sudden loss of control of mutagenic elements, that altered overnight the majority of flora and fauna.

“What monsters and hazards did it create?” – wilds are covered in an alien red jungle, ruins crawling with mutants (reference The Fly, by David Cronenberg).

Act I

The families: Followers (Praxis – denouncing any pre-fall technology as evil) and Lawgivers (Kommittee – a communist collective of enforcers).

And the characters: The Remnant (the founder of Praxis, himself a liquid nanotech borg), The Sentinel (protector of the dispossessed).

First Session

We drew the map of adding threats and locations.

The group ended up hunting down one of several inhuman agents that left the megalopolis towards one of the settlements (New Venetia, on a large green water lake).

The agent was much more human in appearance than any mutant, and came with a messianic message: “embrace the future” – an ironic corruption / evolution of Praxis creed.

The agent was neutralized by The Remnant, but with high collateral damage. The rest of the session saw the Kommittee unearthing the source point of this creed and the characters confronting the corrupted Praxis chapter and its alien corruptors.

The Turn of Ages was mere 15 years and saw Praxis splitting in heresy and suffering persecution from the common people, due to the collateral damage of their conflict. The Kommittee oversaw the creation of Crossroads, a fort in the wilds, on the ideal junction of possible roads.

Rulewise, transition between character and family focus was smooth. Families suffered for the focus of the story on the Threat. Players also forgot to take their Character’s Advancement in account.